The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment..

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong..

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be..

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a….

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream..

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand..

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable..

If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the th….

The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being..

You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore..

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the worl….

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heavi….

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains..

I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities..

Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another….

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two..

Art is the triumph over chaos..

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger appl….

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsines….

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone..

I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters,….